The world seems to be in the midst of a pandemic of burnout, spread across all age groups, genders, professions, and cultures. Research specific to mental health providers finds that between 21 and 67 percent may be experiencing high levels. Other related “conditions” have been identified, including compassion fatigue (CF), vicarious traumatization (VT), and secondary traumatic stress (STS), all aimed at describing the negative impact that working in human services can have on mental and physical health.
An entire industry of authors, coaches, and trainers has sprung up to address the problem, providing books, videos, presentations, retreats, and organizational consultation. There’s only one problem: currently fashionable approaches to burnout don’t work. In fact, they may make it worse!
What can be done? In the latest issue of the Psychotherapy Networker, my long time colleague and co-writer, Dr. Mark Hubble, and I review research on the field’s Top Performing therapists. Once again, they have something to teach us, this time about “healing the heart of the healer.” Click here to access a PDF of the article.
Until next time,
Scott
Scott D. Miller, Ph.D.
At how many hours per week do they cap and find counselors become less effective (at Calgary Counselling Center, mentioned near end of article)?
Thank you.
Hello Scott: Thanks for your attention to this topic. I am a seasoned trauma psychologist [read getting older and grey] and I have followed your work over the years. How do we remain professional and caring when our training as psychologists teaches us to be highly competitive and to hide any weaknesses from our peers and our supervisors? I question our North American understanding of trauma and I think our methods of offering help contribute to burnout. I believe strongly that we can face unimaginable and sometimes unspeakable pain from our clients and sometimes we will fail in our best efforts to help them. The risk is that we can be left to carry this pain as function of our failures. I see this struggle often among those who I supervise and I had to face it myself several years ago. Despite all of my best self-care activities and running [literally as a marathoner] I simply had no space to carry any more pain. Despite the views of some well-known psychologists, slick techniques (e.g., CBT, PE, CPT) do not protect us from being disheartened through failure. After all, we are one human trying to assist another human or a group and as a social being we are affected. The challenge for therapists and the training system is to teach us how to lower our professional walls [read defenses], face our own unfinished business and reconcile our emotional conflicts. And, let’s face it, we all have them. Otherwise, we risk becoming ineffective ‘talking heads’ as a profession.